Indeed the MRC is worried that the presence of scientists outside Parliament could have a “negative impact” and might “actually be counter-productive to the research that (the MRC) would like to see progress”. One might think that biomedical researchers had a widespread reputation for drunkenly burning down legislatures, biting escaping MPs and hypothesizing in a most promiscuous fashion.

One can understand scientists’ wish to put their case, their integrity having been thoroughly blown on in the debates which have preceded this most recent stage of the Human Fertilization and Enbryology Bill. The creation of the hybrid embryos necessary to extract the stem cells is anomalous in that it had been deemed to need primary government legislation.

Some members of the House of Lords (with the trenchent and no doubt valuable support of demonstrators wearing cow and rabbit masks) tried to amend the Bill to ban the creation of hybrid embryos. They failed, so the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church then intervened, mounting pulpits to thunder that the proposals open the door to science of Frankenstein proportions. (Poor Mary, another of my time whose name and work is often taken in vain.)

Given that Cardinals used their pulpits to attack the work of scientists in a public and ill-informed manner, then demanded that their followers in Parliament vote according to dogma rather than the health interests of their constituents, the scientists are right to want to attend the lobby. Mr Goldacre, commentator on this blog asserts he will be there possibly wearing a dog’s head for ease of identification, although that may cause some people to think that Egyptian deities also hold strong opinions opinion on hybrid embryo research.

My own MP is a very amiable gentleman, easily possessed of enough brains to make a sparrow fly crooked, and some of the finer points and the potential of this advanced science may evade him. People talking to him about ‘Frankenstein science’ (there is a counterlobby planned for the same day) may have made an impression that requires an expert head to disabuse him. Who better to explain it to him than a scientist familiar with the work in detail?

Member of the House of Commons have received letters from members of the public opposing hybrid embryos, many of these people will have religious convictions and a religious hierarchy behind them.

It is only right that patients groups anxious for a cure for themselves or relatives, should be supported by the scientists whose patient work will lead to therapies and cures.

I have spoken to a refugee who worked for the pro-life lobby and has seen them at work in these situations. Far from suggesting that scientists are not fit to be let out in public, the MRC should be encouraging every embryologist and stem-cell researcher within reach to attend, indeed it should be paying for charabanc trips (including allowances for tea and sugar) from the Universities of Durham and Newcastle so that the northern bastion of British stem cell expertise can attend and stand with Dr Minger at the barricades of reason.

The f-word (Frankenstein) will be bandied around a great deal on Monday and pressure of the most egregious sort brought to bear by people who will be reminding MPs that they speak not just for themselves, but for whole majority-endangering congregations: experience and a knowledge of the science will at a premium.

In a previous post, I mentioned that Mr Highfield, science editor of The Daily Telegraph, had written that starlings know when humans are watching them. A trait that developed in France, I hazarded.

For our correspondents abroad who may not be wholly aware, the French have a habit of shooting and consuming aves of any size. They will blaze away at mere wrens with something that would not have been out of place on the gundeck of a line of battle ship at – ahem – Trafalgar, and take a particular delight preparing and eating the ortolan in a manner that may raise the eyebrows.

Therefore it may be to a French starling’s advantage to know when a M’sieu is bringing a beady eye and duck-gun loaded with scrap iron to bear.

My eyebrows are not raised: as anyone who has read The Voyage of the Beagle knows I shot and trenched my way round the world. I fear I and my fellow HMS Beagle shipmates may be partly responsible for Lonesome George’s current, and biologically terminal frustrations (we ate a few of his kind), so am in no position to cast stones.

(For my overseas audience these are BBC1, BBC2 and Channel 4, all of which are funded from the public purse, and ITV and Five, which sell commercials to fund their activities.)

Monday 28 April: none.
Tuesday 29 April: none.
Wednesday 30 April: none.
Thursday 1 May: The Big Bang Theory! Channel 4 10.30pm. I am a big-animals-on-islands type of scientist and I confess to being easily bewildered when people start talking in equations. I settled down with a dry sherry and was looking forward to having the formation of the universe explained to me, only to suffer a very third rate ‘comedy’ about three scientists with poor social skills whose lives are disrupted by arrival of a beautiful woman in their midst.

Contrary to what some ill-informed people think I am no eugenicist, but I do wish the parents of the scriptwriters for The Big Bang Theory had been hosed down with cold water when they got jiggy, as one would do with dogs mating in one’s garden, to avoid the children asking embarrassing questions. (My grasp of modern idiom is coming along well, I feel.)

Friday 2 May: none.
Saturday 3 May: none.

Not a single factual science programme on any of the channels available to everyone who has a television. However in the dramatic presentations it is clear what science is for: it is to help the police elucidate which American has killed which other American. It is also clear who becomes a scientist: people of eccentric appearance and manner with peculiarly arranged hair. They inhabit extremely modern, uncluttered and strangely lit laboratories, there is usually only one of them and he or she possesses an extraordinary range of scientific specialities and skills. They are sessile, but propel themselves on chairs which swivel and have small wheels, often making verbal ejaculations as they do.

They also have a Magic Results Machine. My week of investigation shows that modern science goes like this: the scientific problem comes down to something that is picked up in forceps, a torch is shone on it and it is given a Significant Look. Next, it is placed in a small plastic tube, something clear is dribbled from a pipette and catalysed with another Significant Look. The tube is taken by a small robot arm into the Magic Results Machine.

The Results take as many as sixty seconds to be produced, in which time a Policeman In Sunglasses (the PIS) demands them sooner. The Magic Results are spat from a printer and within minutes Science has allowed the PIS to take the suspected malefactor into custody. He naturally protests his innocence, but The Science produced by the Magic Results Machine Will Not Be Denied. Someone starts playing a double-bass in the room and after a Significant Pause, the Science that Will Not Be Denied causes the suspect to Tell All to the PIS.

The British version does away with the science: a constable simply beats the confession out of the suspect with a telephone directory. Quicker, it saves on the double-bass player’s fees and is truer to life.

A little research shows I am not the only one surprised by this lack of science programming: a Mr David Attenborough, a broadcasting naturalist of some repute this week gave ‘industry executives’ a chiding that their schedules had no place for science.

Science broadcasting in the past seemed to have been better – there was a programme called Tomorrow’s World, and I am reading a book by a Professor Feynman who relates delivering talks about physics to camera for the BBC, and the BBC reporting they were widely watched and appreciated.

What now appears is – if I may coin a phrase – parascience. It does not deal with the raw work of our noble trade, but its applied results in society and the environment. It leaves the impression that science comes from a Magic Results Machine.

Mind you, one of those would have been useful in 1836: pick up finch skin in forceps, goggle at it significantly for a while, place a piece in small tube which disappears into Magic Results Machine and sixty seconds later it spits out the Theory of Natural Selection. Which Thos Huxley would then seize, slip into a telephone directory and rush off to use it to beat up some Bishops.

Having thrown no few brickbats around, I feel I must give an honourable mention to the BBC Science and Nature webpage. There is clearly no shortage of science reportage in the BBC, a shame so little makes it to anything other than a computer screen. The wireless schedules show that BBC Radio 4 features science each weekday at 9pm. I shall have to investigate further.

But not the Daily Telegraph (there is something reassuring about a gothic masthead on a newspaper, it suggests that there is a dangerous lunatic in a position of authority in the typesetting department) which does have a science section, and today a dispiriting story: MPs’ report blames government and a quango for science funding crisis

(A quango turns out not to be a recently discovered small marsupial, but a gathering of people less useful than a small marsupial.) It seems a that a quango has failed to fund several projects deemed important by physicists: jobs have been lost, science has suffered, grails of physics will lie undiscovered! and – worse – foreigners are pointing and shaking their heads in a pitying fashion.

Being a peaceable soul, I will gently regret that this quango was guano, but the Science and Technology Facilities Council had better hope that Thos. Huxley (who bookended the coffee bar with me at the Natural History Museum) does not lurch from his own place to confront them.

Huxley did much to establish science as an independent profession here and had an unforgiving tongue: when my persistent critic Bishop Soapy Sam Wilberforce was thrown from his horse and killed by a head injury Huxley commented: ‘For once, reality and his brain came into contact and the result was fatal.’ He made the comment to the physicist John Tyndall who had nothing to say about the gravity of the accident.

Elsewhere the Telegraph’s Mr Highfield reports that starlings know when humans are watching them. A trait that first developed in France, is my guess.

How sad to read that our education system appears to be allowing our embryonic scientists to miss the excitement of practical experimentation. Only yesterday I was talking to a man whose scientific epiphany came when a student teacher blew his hairpiece off in a thermite fume cupboard explosion. He said that the sight of the poor teacher reeling from the cupboard sooty of face and removing his goggles to reveal two shocked white eyes will stay with him to his grave. The class naturally maintained a dignified silence. He went on to become a highly successful chemist, en passent blowing up a sink in his school chemistry lab.

If young people do not get that heady whiff of chemicals on entering a lab, anticipate with morbid fascination their first dissection and have that thrill of pride when they wear that first lab coat, how are we to fire their imaginations to love the sciences? I have not been long in this new world, but I am sure a cross-cutting multidisciplinary scoping project with independently verifiable deliverables and a rigorous outcomes auditing process is being planned to tackle this matter.

Meanwhile I am thrilled to see in these pages a Skeptical Chymist expressing the proper admiration for John Dalton a Victorian scientist..

Better yet, the Friends of Charles Darwin has some sound advice for my continuing education.

I had assumed that with this modern society being so dependent on the work of scientists, that the newspapers would ring with their achievements. I was delighted to see The Observer (which was in print when I was alive for the first time) and fell on it with a glad cry.

Science is first mentioned on page 4, in a story where ‘science’ is asked to rule the extent to which illegal drugs cause harm. Science could provide data on the extent of harm caused by drugs, but it is for politicians need to make like pikaia and grow some backbone. Tinctures of laudanum and cannabis were legal when I lived in Down House, and Emma would often administer it both to our own brood and to the sick of the village. That would make her the village’s ‘Main Woman’. Queen Victoria used tincture of cannabis, which I can only imagine made her more easily amused.

Science is next mentioned on page 12, with a story about a mother and baby infected with something called a ‘superbug’, although I cannot see what is super about a bacterium that has evolved immunity to most of the treatments we have against it. Given that pencillin was not used clinically until 1942, this I think shows that evolution does need not millennia to show its effects, especially when a population is subject to selective pressures. If I may use a phrase I overheard used by a seaman on HMS Beagle, creationists, ‘may take that and shove it up, mate! Sideways.’

The Observer’s science editor has had a busy few days: he writes on Page 16 of the cures offered by the extraordinarily venomous cone snail, and again on page 27 on the need for the world to embrace genetically modified plants.

Not as much as I would have expected, given the importance of science…hold on. Another supplement falls from the pages. The Guardian Science Course…part 2. Life and Genetics. Page 8, Evolution and Darwin. Excuse me while I put the Sunday beef in and sit down to read about myself.

So much to catch up on, I shall be spending the day going through the Sundays. Who will win the premiership? What of Hillary going negative in the US Elections? America was a beacon of progress in my day, which is why I sent copies of The Origin to Gray and Agassiz at Harvard. And I am flattered to find that in 1912 President Theodore Roosevelt referred in a speech to ‘the great Darwin’, and later wrote of his education: ‘Thank Heaven, I sat at the feet of Darwin and Huxley…’ (Huxley would be blown up like a peacock had he read that!)

All the candidates who today aspire to lead that great nation will be convinced of the benefits of science and the truth of evolution I am sure.

when I overheard that some American has had the nerve to make a film called Expelled traducing natural selection and championing something called ‘intelligent design’. I thought we had settled Mr Paley’s watchmaker nonsense in 1859.

I am used to bad reviews: I was much savaged in the press when I published The Origin of Species, but Expelled holds me responsible for a particularly vile chapter of genocide which occurred in the 1930s and 40s. I do not recall advocating genocide, indeed distinctly remember writing with anguish about the massacres of the Indians in South America during my voyage on HMS Beagle. Could it be that my critics have formed opinions about my work without actually reading it? Surely not.

Anyway, one evening I looked up to see a certain Mr Stein gawping at me. Executive Producer of Expelled, no less, and I am afraid it was more than even a marble statue could stand!

I urge you to click the link above. Others have noticed Mr Stein’s presence at my marble feet, and have commented in a most amusing fashion.

And so I am back. Nature has been so kind as to give me a blog and asked me to cast my eye over modern scientific developments. A little stiff in the joints, and with some catching up to do (if only I had known about genetics in 1858!) but if there is anything you wish me to consider, please leave a comment or contact chazdarwin(at)gmail.com